This is exactly what we use for AIX 4.3.3 and 5.1 and it works fine, but I cannot get it to work with 5.2. When I boot, the filesystem does not mount. After the boot, I can mount it manually with just a "mount /Common" command.

The default option for an AIX NFS mount is hard. We have NFS on
servers running 4.3.3, 5.1 and 5.2 configured with the default and they
all mount as expected after a reboot provided the remote host is up and
the file system is exported.
Unless you have a specific reason for using the soft option I would
suggest using trying the hard mount option. See the mount man page for
a distinction between the two.

We used to use hard mounts until one day when the remote host was unavailable and it had disastrous consequences for all our production machines trying to read files from or do a "df" on a filesystem that was no longer available. We've been using soft mounts for at least a few years now with no problems.

Are you saying that the "mount at system restart" option might work if we hard mount the filesystem? If so, why? Did something change in AIX 5.2? This is exactly how we have our 4.3.3 and 5.2 machines set up and they all work fine.

What I'm trying to say is we are using the hard mount option without
any issues. I've never used the soft mount option so I haven't had to
research any differences there might be on our OS levels.
We have other processes in place to monitor our server availability
and the status of our mount points on each so that works for us.
I wasn't clear as to why you would be choosing the soft mount option.
Now I am.
Follow the link below to the AIX 5L Differences Guide Version 5.2
Addition.

Can you give me one of your /etc/filesystems stanzas on a 5.2 machine for an auto-mounted NFS drive? I've tried changing to hard-mount as you suggest and upping the retries to 2000, to see if it's a timing issue, and I'm still having no success.

This is a brand-new machine, preinstalled with 5.2. However, we do copy a good bit of information from other machines when we configure them - passwd and group files, profiles, motd, etc. Since this is our first 5.2 machine, all that had to come from a similar 5.1 machine. I did save the original files and had to retro-fit some information back into the new files.

So it appears that the files are as they should be. If I execute the first line, it does indicate that $nfs_mount=3D"1", so "/usr/sbin/mount -v nfs all" should run. And executing that command does indeed mount the filesystem.

So the question becomes, when should /etc/rc.nfs run? I don't see it in /etc/inittab. We have disabled NFS on this machine, using rmnfs, because we don't want it to act as an NFS server. Ahhh - here it is! Looking at the man page for rmnfs, I see that it removes rc.nfs from inittab.

So if we want this machine to be an NFS client, but not a server, how do we automatically mount an NFS filesystem at system reboot?

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